Aubuchon Hardware on Route 38 has joined a campaign that will help Tewksbury and Wilmington residents safely dispose of products that contain mercury. The store has two “Keep Mercury From Rising” containers where residents can safely dispose of fluorescent light bulbs.
“Keep Mercury From Rising” sounds like a campaign against global warming, but it is actually a Massachusetts based campaign sponsored by the Mercury Recovery Program, a program created for Wheelabrator Technologies, a ‘waste to energy’ facility located in North Andover, to keep mercury from contaminating our waste stream and water resources.
Aubuchon Manager John MacKay said that residents should bring their used fluorescent bulbs to the register where an employee will take the bulbs and place them gently in the collection buckets in the back room to prevent breakage. When a bucket is filled there is an alternating schedule where he will contact either Tewksbury or Wilmington to have the bucket removed and replaced.
Last year the Mercury Recovery Program provided both Tewksbury and Wilmington with storage sheds to hold the filled containers of light bulbs. When there are enough containers in the shed then the town calls the Veolia Environmental Services Facility in Stoughton to come and remove them. Veolia recycles 100% of the lamps into new lamps. The town pays Veolia and sends the invoice to the Mercury Recovery Program, which reimburses the town 100% of the expense.
Pat Scanlon is an independent consultant acting as the Mercury Recovery Program Coordinator. He said that the Mercury Recovery Program serves 75 communities in Massachusetts and that last year they recovered in excess of 1700 pounds of mercury. “That is mind boggling,” Scanlon said.
They recycled more than 300,000 linear feet of four-foot lamps, just from municipalities and schools. Scanlon said that placed end to end the bulbs would reach from the State House in Boston to the State House in New Haven, CT, as a car would drive there!
Last year there were more than 420,000 tons of waste processed at the North Andover Wheelabrator facility, and with an assessment of .50 cents per ton, that means that they had more than $200,000 to spend on environmental programs. The Mercury Recovery program used this money to educate about mercury, to pay for the bulbs to be disposed of properly, and they even went into local schools and replaced thermometers, blood pressure cuffs and barometers with new digital ones.
Mercury is an elemental metal that can act as a conductor or switch that can be used not only in light bulbs, but also in thermostats that keep homes warm each winter, in glass thermometers people use to check a child’s temperature, and button batteries, among other things.
According to “Keep Mercury From Rising,” mercury can be either a naturally occurring element or a man-made substance. Natural sources of mercury emissions include volcanic activity, forest fires, and the off-gassing of soils, rocks and the oceans while man-made emissions of mercury are from chemical and industrial processes, metal smelting, home heating oil, medical waste incinerators, coal-fired utility boilers, agricultural operations, and solid waste disposal facilities.
In 2000, new regulations required that all municipal “waste to energy” plants install sophisticated air pollution control technology and develop material separation plants to reduce mercury emissions. According to Arleen O’Donnell, Deputy Commissioner of Environmental Protection for the State of Massachusetts, there has been a “91 percent reduction in the amount of mercury emitted as a result of these programs in combination.” Today man-made emissions account for less than half of the mercury produced each year.
Wilmington Board of Health Director Gregory Erickson explained that the first of the more compact and energy efficient light bulbs that were introduced several years ago are starting to burn out and are entering the waste stream. Erickson said that while these bulbs are great because they require less energy, which therefore saves in energy production costs and homeowner electricity costs, people need to know that these bulbs contain mercury and it needs to be disposed of properly.
Aubuchon is a point of purchase site which means that consumers can properly dispose of old fluorescent bulbs while shopping for new ones. Scanlon describes it as a win-win-win situation…the environment wins, the town wins and the store wins.
The Aubuchon containers are for fluorescent light bulbs only. Wilmington residents should contact their Board of Health for information about the proper disposal of other mercury filled items such as thermometers and thermostats. Tewksbury residents will find containers for disposal of these items at Town Hall.
If you break a thermometer or other item containing mercury, please call 1-866-9Mercury (1-866-963-7287) to receive expert advice for a safe clean up in order to keep your family safe and keep mercury out of the trash and out of water supplies. For more information see www.keepmercuryfromrising.org.
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